NDO allows you to store objects in relational databases

Relational databases like Oracle, MySQL or MS SQL Server have a big advantage: The data model is easy to understand and to analyze. Stored data can be evaluated independently from the application that generated it. This is a core demand of IT strategy in bigger companies. The disadvantage of using relational databases is a huge code overhead for persistence because relational databases are not well suited for storing objects. NDO eliminates this overhead with the concept of transparent persistence, but maintains the advantage of relational database systems. One of the key goals in developing NDO was to generate database structures which are easy to understand and to analyze. Wherever possible the class and field names are used as table and column names in the database structure.

With respect to IT strategy, the combination of relational databases and NDO is superior to Object Oriented Databases (OODBMS), an alternative to object persistence solution. Under certain circumstances, OODBMS are faster but they behave like a black box. The preference for relational systems is clearly visible in the market size (13 billion US $ in 2003 for RDBMS compared to less than 1 billon for OODBMS in 2003 according to Gartner Research).